bitcoin.stackexchange.com Archives - 09 December 2012, Sunday

When miners invest in mining hardware, they get a device that generates hashes at a rate of X, essentially forever. What they will get from it is X times the integral from now to infinity of a*B*P/D, where P is the value of a bitcoin, D is the difficulty, B is the block reward and a i...

GDP (and most other stats you would think to use for this) can't be accurately determined by the network without trusting someone. The network can only see the movement of BTC; it has no information about non-BTC currencies, goods, or services. For GDP, some centralized organization w...

Important parts in bold, for those who don't want to read the detail! I've received lots of tiny transactions, in amounts sometimes as low as 0.000003BTC. Even though I've also received (relatively) larger amounts, I'm worried that when I want to spend my bitcoins the transaction fees...

How anonymous are Bitcoin transactions? How many bitcoins will there eventually be? How did transaction fees work in the version 0.3.24? Are there any feasible methods of maliciously reversing transactions? Is there a way to undo transactions with a “too low” fee? How would I hand cod...

This seems like a really basic question, but I'm having trouble searching for answers on it. My understanding is that my bitcoin client (Bitcoin v0.7.1-beta) has basically theoretically downloaded the entire transaction history of every bitcoin transaction that has ever occurred. I ca...

How can one embed custom data in block headers? Is the timestamp in the genesis block relevant? How is block-solution-withholding a threat to mining pools? What are the advantages/disadvantages of a continuously decreasing block reward compared to the current method? Bitcoin Block Siz...

For privacy, Bitcoin relies on "pseudonymity", which means that the only way people can choose not to disclose their identity, is by making it hard to link addresses to people/businesses/.... Publishing an address publicly obviously makes you give up that privacy, but that's not a pro...

I'm working on a project involving mining Bitcoins for charity. I'm writing my own miner, and though I may eventually set up my own pool for this purpose, for now I'm planning on using existing pools. My question is: how can I set up the miner so that people can use it to mine toward ...

I found that in my university there are some FPGA's available to test and to play with. I am a software/web programmer and I have never been working with verilog or whatever is used to program FPGA. So is there a nice tutorial which explains how to start mining using FPGA. I do not wa...

The average user normally doesn’t want to host a 3+GB file on his machine and wait for hours for it to download. What are the security risks of running a lightweight client? And how does this affect my daily transactions? What features does a “full” client offer a “lightweight” does not?

As PayPal is not a bank and reserves the right to freeze your account for whatever reason they deem fits them, you should never use PayPal, unless you can afford to lose your money, or are prepared to take them to court and win, should they steal your funds. While this is not specific...

Bitcoin transaction has three important parts: from address A to address B amount of bitcoins If Bitcoin client broadcasts correctly formed transaction then the network knows that certain amount of bitcoins were sent from address A to address B. If the owner of address B wants to send...

I have been checking the Bitcoin wiki for script and Bitcoin contracts and I have some doubts about advanced contracts. For instance, I have seen in many places references to password controlled transfers, where only the owner of a keyword could get the BTC in the contract. Do you kno...

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When a venture raises capital in bitcoins it spends those on assets and contracts tied to fiat money. As a result if the exchange rate rises, the venture's earnings are at a lower rate (in terms of bitcoins). As a result, the lower dividends cause the valuation for the venture to drop...

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Trading on Mt. Gox, which is now the largest Bitcoin exchange, started in July 2010 at an exchange rate of $0.05 USD. This comment suggests that on May 2010, bitcoins were traded at bitcoinmarket.com for roughly $0.004 USD. What other exchanges existed this early in Bitcoin's life? Wh...

What is the “silk road” and what does it have to do with bitcoin? How do I configure the Bitcoin client for SSL on Windows? What protection does Bitcoin have against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks? Can Bitcoin technology be leveraged to implement a decentralized trust system (i.e. a ...

Any MH/s rating on any device should be considered an estimate. Actual capabilities will vary on a device-by-device basis and external factors such as ambient temperature and network connection speed/stability also enter into the equation. You will also notice a difference between the...

I am looking at starting a business that will send and receive a large amount Bitcoins in a semi automated manner using API's. I was wondering what is the best way to do do this in a secure way to limit my exposure to hacking? My initial thoughts are as follows: 1) Clearing Wallet: ha...

Just started using bitcoins today and since i needed them rather urgently I hastily bought them and transferred them to my wallet before actually setting up my wallet.The client is downloading the block chain but its taking painfully long...3 hours and counting.i was just wondering if...

At the current exchange rate, GPU mining can still be profitable if electricity is below twenty cents per kWh. In less than three weeks, the daily mining revenues will drop by half in an instant (the block reward subsidy "halving" event, around November 29th). Difficulty may drop also...

It does not answer your question of getting your private keys out of bitcoin-qt, but this link explains how you import a single private key into MultiBit: http://multibit.org/help_importASingleKey.html If you have more than one private key it is simply more rows in the import file. Th...

Apart from the official bitcoin client what other clients are there? Are there equivalent alternatives to Bitcoin? Is there an easy way to check out the market cap of the alternative currencies? Bitcoin alternative designed for NVIDIA Bitcoin over HTTP? Is “Dacoinminster's Second Bitc...

I am running the standard client on a micro Amazon EC2 instance. When I am synchronising Bitcoin with the network, it uses about 50% of the available CPU. After it is fully synchronised, I leave it alone and it cranks up to 100% by itself. What can be causing the standard client to be...

Are you asking what option lets you withdraw from BitSTAMP? Across the top menu is Withdraw, and from there pick Bitcoin as the withdrawal method, which gives this link: https://www.bitstamp.net/account/withdraw/bitcoin/ Now if you are asking where to withdraw your coins to, then that...

I would like to introduce a number of people that are not necessarily tech-savvy to Bitcoin and instruct them how to make their first payments. Is there some "Bitcoin for dummies" guide that I could be referencing that would be understandable to anyone capable of using a computer and ...

I am running the standard client on a weak computer (Windows environment). It often is slow and unresponsive, and takes a noticeable chunk of the hard drive. I would want to replace it with some alternative client that offers the same functionality (mainly, running as server and suppo...

I have written my own hardware implementation for hash computation. I am participating in a pool, that is I get sent the midstate and some data which should then be hashed. I wonder, whether there are any testvectors out there, that is I need input the midstate plus data, and see then...

I have used bitcoin previously via windows GUI miners, but never faced an issue like this before. I am now running Ubuntu 12.04x64 and using and updated wallet 7.1.0 Satoshi Clietn. The sync looks like it is working but the first block never loads. I have had the wallet syncronizing, ...

Say for an exchange that manages thousands of users, and each transaction needs a new receiving address, how much space would thier wallet(s) take. I am assuming 100000 users and each user would have about 10000 transactions, so there are about 10^9 keys to be stored. For safety, we w...

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Every block has exactly one "coinbase transaction", the one transaction which doesn't have actual inputs, but gets all the fees and mining subsidy. Every 210000 blocks, this subsidy halves. Right now, each block is allowed (not required!) to bring 50.00000000 BTC into circulation. Ver...